You know the scene in The Big Lebowski, when the goons are in the Dude’s apartment, and the one guy is dunking his head in the toilet yelling “Where’s the money Lebowski?” And then when he lets the Dude up briefly for air, the Dude says, “It’s down there somewhere, let me take another look.”
We are the Dude right now, asking to have our head dunked in the toilet again.
I usually agree with John Gruber. Usually. Not always.
Like many, I was outraged this week when word got out that Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.
I am not and have never been a Washington Post subscriber, so I couldn’t cancel my subscription in protest. I was, however, an Amazon Prime subscriber. So I canceled that instead. (Even before that action was suggested by The Atlantic.)
Gruber says that canceling your Prime subscription over this is “like pissing in the ocean.” Which, eww. But also, yeah, so?
Perhaps I should clarify.
I know canceling my Amazon Prime subscription isn’t really going to hurt Amazon. And it’s even less going to hurt Jeff Bezos, even though I would point out that while he’s no longer the CEO of the company, he’s still the chairman of the board and largest shareholder. But let’s be real. There is absolutely nothing I am personally capable of that would have the slightest impact on Jeff Bezos.
Gruber does go on to say:
If you feel better personally cancelling your Prime membership, do it. But don’t think for a second it will matter one iota to Amazon’s bottom line.
Yes, exactly. I didn’t do it because I thought it would affect Amazon’s bottom line. I did it because this was the final straw for my willingness to participate in the retail world Amazon has created. I’ve been conflicted over using Amazon for years, but I still did because it was so convenient. Not having Amazon Prime makes it less convenient, so I’ll spend less (hopefully nothing) with them in the future. That’s not going to hurt Amazon. But it’s going to help me, to know that I’m opting out of participation in a system with which I fundamentally disagree.
As it happens, I also owned a bit of Amazon stock. A very small bit. Three shares, to be precise. I sold those this week as well. (Some portion of my retirement is tied up in mutual funds which I also know for certain are partially invested in Amazon. There’s only so much a person can do.)
I’m generally not one to engage in boycotts or other forms of protest, because I don’t think they do much good. They rarely get the message across to the intended target, and only cause disruption for innocent people caught in the middle. In some ways that may be the case here. But I doubt any Amazon delivery drivers or warehouse workers are going to need to be laid off just because I’ve stopped shopping there. I mean, I bought a lot of stuff from Amazon over the years, but not that much.
Ultimately, your individual actions are more about your own life than anyone or anything else. Do the things that matter to you, and try to avoid participating in things you disagree with. That’s all you can really do… unless you’re a megalomaniac.
After all… if you gotta go, you gotta go.
I took them down both because I was unhappy with my tone and because I thought maybe I was overreacting. But with each passing day there seems to be further evidence that I was not.
I will just say this: I believe, more than ever, that the future of the WordPress open source project is in peril with Matt at the helm.
If you are the regular reader of my blog, you may notice that I’ve unpublished a recent series of rants over the current and escalating war between Automattic (really, Matt Mullenweg himself) and WP Engine.
I’ve unpublished them because they were angry and unfocused rants, as I struggled to get a handle on why what is happening is happening, and what it really means to (and for) me, as well as the larger WordPress community.
This afternoon I channeled that frustration into some long-overdue household tasks — fixing a kitchen cabinet door, shampooing the carpet in the upstairs hallway, clearing out the clogged drain of a bathroom sink — and those few hours of manual labor gave me time to sift through the thoughts and feelings piling up in my brain.
I realized that the heart of the matter is a lack of common agreement on the nature of free open source software (FOSS) — specifically, both the ethics and the economics of FOSS. Now that I’ve realized what is at the heart of my recent frustration and anger, I can start thinking — and writing — more constructively about it, rather than firing off aimless missives.
A more coherent mini-essay on this topic is forthcoming. But for now, the earlier angry posts are unpublished. Gone, but not forgotten. And, well, not really gone. Thanks to WordPress.
Stay tuned…
A small indie developer creates an amazingly powerful and well-designed WordPress plugin. Eventually it grows too big for him and his small team to maintain, so he sells it to a larger plugin development company. That company, boosted even further by the value this plugin adds to their stable of products, gets bought by an even larger hosting company. Another company — one owned by the same guy who controls the open source WordPress project itself — was for years a substantial shareholder of said hosting company, but eventually sold off its shares to a private equity firm that now controls the hosting company.
Then, a war breaks out between those two big companies. Things escalate, and (because one side is controlled by that guy who, when he’s not on safari in Africa, is busy with his finger in several different pies, representing an obvious conflict of interest) the open source project summarily takes over the free base version of that plugin I was talking about at the beginning.
I’m a small indie plugin developer too. Luckily, I’m probably too small and insignificant to have the core team steal my work from me, but hey… open source is open source. People can use it however they want, with no obligation towards the creators.
Also, rich guys apparently don’t understand irony.
Finally, let’s get the terminology straight here. Matt is calling this a “fork” of Advanced Custom Fields. But a fork doesn’t get to keep the original URL, download stats and reviews. A fork starts from square one. A fork is, essentially, what the ACF team was forced in this situation to do with their own original plugin.
No WordPress plugin developer should ever have to post a message like this on their website:
